Extra

For thousands of Alameda County residents, New Year's eve will be anything but a party. Starting Jan. 1, 2010, the clock will start ticking on a three-month time limit on General Assistance funds received by employable economically disadvantaged people.
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Page One

Looking back on this year, it has been full to say the least. I took my first ever road trip, solo style across three states. I was proud of myself for refusing to believe (yet again) that women should continue to live in fear. I hear so often, “don’t do this” or “it’s not safe to do that.”
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Grace Boylan and Herb were the greatest practical jokers I ever met. I met them back in the days before the Interstates homogenized America, in the days when two-lane blacktops traversed the country.
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I got a befuddled insight at my favorite Mexican market today. I stood there suspended between two extremes and couldn’t make a decision. I was doing what I so often do, shopping for those special ingredients that turn leftovers into a newly conceived meal.
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Like me, my new friend Naomi loves to ride her bike around Berkeley. She has a rack on the trunk of her car, so we can take our bikes to explore other places, as well. I appreciate Naomi’s energy, her get-up-and-go spirit, and her self-confidence. The fact that she is 75 years old makes her all the more inspiring!
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Digital literacy is a crucial survival skill and many who have tried to remedy their deficiencies in this area have found, as I have, that they are humiliated by those from whom they seek instruction.
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When the citizens of Berkeley so generously passed a small—$5 million for five years—bond measure in the late 1970s, to put parks in neighborhoods in which there were none, they created an opportunity to open (“daylight”) a portion of an urban creek for the first time in California, and, possibly, the nation.
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Today I am coughing, choking in smoke. I see human eyes peering at me through wide angle cameras where once I’d see children with balloons, lovers soaking in the sea breeze close to the Gateway. Today I hear feet pounding on my head. I hope the commandoes have come. My inside is burning. Gunshots ruining my lovely skin of wall to wall Persian carpets. My skull of chandeliers cracked. A few days and all will be quiet. Images of me burning just a curious click on the web. And the rich folk of Mumbai will return to my caresses of chicken tikka masala served by men and women who lost their colleagues and close friends today.
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Today I came by train, boarded the train without a ticket in Bihar. Somehow managed to get into the second-class train compartment in Delhi. Again ticket ke bina and came vaise he to Mumbai. Same pant shirt for three days. Chatraphati Shivaji station—never seen so many people in my life. English I don’t really know. Learnt some words in my village school. But I wanted to come to Mumbai, become film star like Shah Rukh Khan. Aree Mumbai chalo, film star bano.
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When I first came to California, in 1957, and was looking for a job, I learned that I met the qualifications to be a social worker. I took the civil service exam, passed it, and in a very short time later, was a bona fide social worker!
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When I was about seven years old I figured out that Santa Claus was just something somebody made up. Seven is about the time you realize that there’s just no way one guy in a sleigh can haul all that stuff around the world in just one night. He just couldn’t handle the inventory.
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I got up today with the saffron sunrise. Have been traveling through the traffic jam of Marine Drive and Matunga, going through gullies, veering to avoid hitting children playing cricket in corners. Being jolted by bumps on dug up roads. Yes, I’m just another black and yellow fiat taxi on Mumbai’s roads. I’ve had my morning meal of petrol at the pump. My wheels now running and rolling. Young children in school uniforms, old women in saris and burkhas, men in sharp suits and mullahs with flowing beards all have sat in my behind. These two boys look no different—clean shaven, jeans and Tshirt. One slips a package underneath my seat. The other helps. You ask how I see this? I have eyes in my behind, rear view mirror you call it. Soon other strangers will sit in my back seat and we will go towards Santa Cruz station, complaining about the suffocating sun. I do not know now but soon those strangers and me will be broken to bits. But for now those boys slipping something underneath my seat look like ordinary, clean shaven denim jeans and T-shirt types.
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It was my job, when I was working some 30 years ago, to present our membership with speakers about subjects on the natural history of animals, once a month throughout the year. This also included one special presentation of a speaker with renowned recognition in the field of animal behavior.
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As one inclined to be a bit neurotic even under the best of circumstances, I must confess that the Christmas holiday season sends me dangerously close to the brink—not exactly bi-polar, but fairly close.
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When Emily was depressed she rode the 88 bus. She rode to the east, she rode it to the west. She rode it way too much. But, that was the cure. The cure that cured all. No one should feel sorry for themselves this much. No one indeed.
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Take the time-line, my time line. The present, the unspent-part stretches to the horizon of infinity. But this end is weighted heavily towards nostalgia—sometimes it takes only the flutter of a martin’s winged dance over the marsh to startle my soul into memory, or a snow-burdened pine bough drooping down ward, or a child’s china tea set. Let me tell you.
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Prior cuts to Alameda County’s General Assistance loan program and new cuts that will go into effect January 1 represent the worst tendencies of politics and bureaucracy: short-term thinking and scapegoating the poor. A county budget is a public commitment of resources to a list of shared priorities created by the people and for the people, to borrow a phrase—the key word being, People. A humane government prioritizes the basic survival needs of its people above all other concerns: there are other places in the budget to cut, and other sources of additional revenue that can be considered.
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In the longest dark, ensconced in my cozy electrified urban habitat, this Winter Solstice, Year 2009 of the Common Era, alive on Turtle Island, planet Terra, the boob tube just gave me a brief glimpse of a ravaged rain forest segment in Indonesia cleared for palm oil production. I’ve seen this before. Watering this human male’s face, I begin crying for Mother Earth.
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The Christmas tree is aglow, even after four weeks. Its presence, soul, spirit fills the living room. It occupies a place of honor on the round maple table by the window. It is short, fat, bushy, full, generous for its two-and-a-half-foot height.
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I was born on a street without a name, in a world of its own, pushed up against Gravesend Bay by high-rise housing projects and summer bungalows turned into year-round residences for real live gypsies.
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I posed for my high school Class of 1944 Yearbook picture without my glasses and wearing faux pearl beads my father had handed me— “Here, you can have this”—while clearing out Wife Number Two’s things. I had tweezed my eyebrows. I wouldn’t smile because my teeth were crooked.
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Have your beloved parents and siblings departed this mortal coil? Have all your cute girlfriends flown the coop? Have your old friends moved far away or become too odd to speak with freely? Do not despair. After all, you still have your memories of Christmases past: your childhood Christmases, your adolescent Christmases, your young adult Christmases and your middle-aged Christmases.
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Life changed forever for my family just after Christmas 2005. It was discovered in the next few months that both my then 89-year-old father and his house were deathly ill. The house that my family had lived in since 1959 was filled with mold in hard-to-clean places, and my father was having chronic breathing problems in addition to his asthma and COPD from smoking cigarettes, though he’d stopped decades before.
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Features

There’s something about New York City. Its hard to put into words. My wife and I have been here for the last week and we were talking about how much Berkeley is like a tiny version of NYC. Surely there are very large differences… geographically, architecturally and in terms of the complex infrastructure of each, but it’s there nonetheless. It’s social, cultural, political and, I would argue, aesthetic. Despite its large scale mechanical features (skyscrapers, subways, the elevated trains and bridges), there has always been and continues to be a love and dedication to the ways in which the built environment touches and moves it’s inhabitants, those lucky New Yorkers.
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Editorial

Ever since George W. Bush rode off into the Dallas sunset, there’s been a void on the national scene. Even Dick Cheney has largely faded from sight. The other Republicans, the ones still in Congress are annoying, but predictably so. But just in time, there’s a replacement in Bush’s old slot of The Man You Love to Hate. Based on his behavior in the last three months or so, not to mention in the last several years, Joe Lieberman is the winner and new champ for that title.
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Columns

I got an interesting press release from the California Academy of Sciences last week. The gist of it was that the Academy's scientists had described 94 new species during 2009. Although most were from exotic places like Yunnan or Burma, there were a few locals in the mix.
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